A new law intended to curb sex trafficking threatens the future of the internet as we know it

The bill’s language penalizes any websites that “promote or facilitate prostitution,” and allows authorities to pursue websites for “knowingly assisting, facilitating, or supporting sex trafficking,” which is vague enough to threaten everything from certain cryptocurrencies to porn videos to sites for perfectly legal escort services. (In fact, one of the bill’s main supporters, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, is arguably using the bill as a path to attack consensual adult pornography, which it has characterized as “violent,“ “degrading,” and “a public health crisis.”)